We are in the final post of this series. Previously we talked about identifying various traffic types, QoS configurations for preferential treatment and NetFlow based DiffSrv verification. This post helps you to use Class Based Quality of Service reporting to validate your QoS policies.
DiffSrv forwarding treatment mechanism does nothing but allocating the bandwidth and raising the priority of interested traffic using a static QoS policies configured on the router. Since the network has varying loads, there is no light on the bandwidth requirement of business critical applications and the comparative usage of bandwidth allocated through QoS policies. A deficit forwarding treatment could create packet loss to the interested traffic which otherwise may be forwarded by best effort treatment.
The CBQoS reporting on pre and post policy metrics and packet drops gives in-depth visibility into forwarding treatment on per class basis, which help in validating the QoS configuration.
CBQoS reports on Pre & Post policy traffic and percentage of drop per traffic class.
The CBQoS reporting in NetFlow Analyzer can show you the pre and post policy traffic usage, dropped traffic and also the queuing for packets in each class.
Pre Policy:
The pre policy graphs under CBQoS reports in the product shows the behavior of the traffic before the effect of the policy and this information is shown on a per class basis. The graphs help identify how the traffic pattern was prior to passing through the interface where the policy is applied.
Post Policy:
The post policy graphs in the product shows the traffic behavior after the effect of the policy. These graphs show the traffic pattern after passing through the interface where the policy is applied and helps identify any change in the traffic. This information too is shown on a per class basis.
Drop and Queuing Traffic:
CBQoS reports in NetFlow Analyzer shows not only the pre and post policy traffic usage, but also the traffic that was dropped and if there was queuing in traffic because of the polices. For each class, the actual dropped traffic, based on volume, packets and speed with percentage values, can be seen along with packet queuing for each traffic class.
The administrator can use these high visibility reports into their existing QoS policies along with the QoS configurations to fine tune the policies for optimum network performance and get the best return of investment.
Hope these blogs will be helpful to implement and validate QoS policies. Please write your queries to netflowanalyzer-support@managengine.com
Thanks
Raj
